Susan Shelley: Trump isn’t starting a war with Iran. He’s ending one.

President Donald Trump did not start a U.S. war with Iran. He’s ending one.

In 1979, the Iranian regime attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, an act of war, and held 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. The hostages were released on the afternoon of Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981. Perhaps that was a final insult to President Carter, or maybe the Iranians didn’t want to give President Reagan enough time to take his hand off the Bible and pick up the phone.

From that day to this, the relationship between Iran and the United States has been a slow-burning war punctuated by attacks, talks, deals, attacks, and more talks.

Through the years, Iran’s leaders have led chants of “Death to America” and backed terrorists that killed Americans. “Forty-seven years of horror with this group,” Trump said Thursday.

The White House released “a partial record of the Iranian regime’s blood-soaked war on Americans.” It cites more than 40 separate attacks against U.S. persons by Iran or its terrorist proxies between 1979 and 2025.

The list includes two attacks in Beirut in 1983 – a suicide car bombing at the U.S Embassy that killed 17 Americans, and the truck bombing that killed 241 U.S military personnel at a Marine compound. Two Iran-backed terrorist groups, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, were responsible.

In 1984, Islamic Jihad terrorists kidnapped and later tortured and killed CIA station chief William Buckley. The same group was responsible for a car bomb attack at the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut that killed 23 people, including two U.S. service members. In 1984 and 1985, Hezbollah terrorists hijacked two commercial aircraft and tortured and killed Americans who were on those flights.

Throughout the 1990s and beyond, Iran-backed terrorists killed Americans with car bombs, suicide bombs, shootings, rocket attacks, missile attacks and drone attacks, and let’s not forget (he didn’t) a 2024 plot to assassinate then-former President Trump.

Terrorists and the rogue nation that backs them are fighting asymmetric warfare against more powerful nations. They succeed in achieving their goals by inflicting highly visible and painful damage, then relying on a global propaganda campaign to limit or prevent  a military response. Propaganda is enabled by the cold-blooded use of human shields, whether hostages or civilians.

Another propaganda trick used in asymmetric warfare is the insistence on a “proportionate” military response. Terrorists win when targeted nations fear that an all-out military response would be viewed disapprovingly by the rest of the world. That’s a proven formula for losing a 47-year-long war.

It appears that President Trump is going to end it now. Grainy black-and-white videos show explosions destroying Iran’s ships, missiles and missile launchers. Decades of military build-up have been vaporized in days. There’s nothing “proportionate” about it.

“We win, they lose,” President Reagan famously said when asked for his strategy on the Cold War.

Like the U.S., Israel has been victimized by asymmetric warfare and global pressure to keep its response “proportionate.” But the October 7, 2023,  attack by Iranian-backed Hamas, a savage massacre of more than 1,000 Israelis with hundreds of hostages seized, broke that world.

Cluelessly, the Biden administration lectured Israel about its military response. In March 2024, President Biden was caught on a hot mic saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed a “come to Jesus” meeting. A few months later, Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress was boycotted by roughly half of the Democratic members of the House and Senate. Vice President Kamala Harris did not attend, citing a previous commitment to speak at a national sorority convention.

That November, Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.

Today, the U.S. and Israel are entering week two of a disproportionate use of force to eliminate, once and for all, the global threat from the regime in Iran.

The world has seen celebrations by Iranians who live in countries where they are free to celebrate. Iran is not yet one of those countries. Massive street demonstrations in January ended in the massacre of more than 30,000 protesters. It was the deadliest state violence against civilians since the last time Iran’s regime engaged in deadly violence against civilian protesters. Those killings were triggered by protests that followed the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by the morality police for wearing her hijab “improperly.” She died in custody after being beaten into a coma.

In the aftermath of Amini’s death, Iranian security forces reportedly killed more than 500 protesters, including women and children.

Then there was that time in 1988 when the Iranian regime executed an estimated 30,000 political prisoners, including women and children.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the Iranian regime’s atrocities against women have included flogging and imprisonment for dress code violations, sexual assault in custody, and executions for self-defense against domestic violence. Children, little girls, are forced into marriage. A 2022 report by the U.S. State Department cited “significant human rights issues” in Iran and Iran-enabled terrorist groups throughout the region, specifically in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

The State Department noted the absence of “meaningful investigation and accountability” for domestic violence, sexual violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage, and violence against ethnic minorities and LGBTQ persons. There were also “the worst forms of child labor,” sham trials leading to the death penalty, mass arrests, and deaths in custody.

Women in Iran have suffered under monstrous repression since 1979. But many in the so-called civilized world seem to have accepted this as a cultural difference deserving of deference. The same groups that think withholding federal funds from Planned Parenthood is a “war on women” have nothing to say about the treatment of women living under the rule of ayatollahs.

It’s possible that the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran will end in a safer world where terrorists can no longer find work and women are free to live their lives.

That would be disproportionately good news.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley